The world's end in Yaughton is a sleepy affair, much like the little Shropshire county village seems to have been when it was full of life. No fire and brimstone, no monsters or minions of Hell. Your sedate wandering through the desolate town is driven by voyeuristic intent, with a shimmering balls of energy marking your path from one drip of story to the next.

Rapture, a PlayStation 4 exclusive, has the sort of story that you piece together as you explore. The balls of light guide you to landmarks where some significant event occurred— "significant" in the context of small town intrigue, that is. There's adultery, lover's quarrels, forbidden love, estrangement... really, a whole lot of sex.

Once you reach a landmark, a brief scene plays out that gives a glimpse of life in Yaughton before everyone went "poof." The actors speak with the voices of the dead (or raptured or whatever), but they're beings of pure light. You don't actually see any humans, you just witness their echoes.

Image: The Chinese Room

Over time, a narrative starts to form. There are connections tying the story's core group of players together, but there's also a larger plot that speaks to the origins of Rapture's apocalyptic event. Whatever destroyed the world started right here in Yaughton.

Unfortunately, a disjointed presentation works against the narrative delivery. Even if you follow the balls of light — you can simply explore, if you prefer — you end up bearing witness to events out of sequence. The broad strokes of the story become clear over time (taking copious notes helps), but the nuances of individual relationships don't surface as easily.

It's also hard to get to know these people when the only identifying characteristic you have to work with is voice. Everyone you see is a vaguely human silhouette, with no distinguishing physical traits. You often spend more time trying to discern who's speaking than focusing on the actual conversation.

Rapture desperately needs something more to connect you with the humans at the heart of the story. That goes for your own character, too. If everyone's gone to "the Rapture," how are you strolling through Yaughton? Why did you avoid that fate?

Image: The Chinese Room

Rapture is filled with mystery, but too often it leaves you feeling like you're blindly groping in the darkness for answers. Some of which never come. The exploratory approach to storytelling that worked so well in games like Gone Home, and even Rapture developer The Chinese Room's other title, Dear Esther, is more than just hard to follow; it's dull.

Part of the blame for that falls on the glacial pace. There's just one walking speed, and it's far too slow to accommodate the freely explorable world's sprawl. It takes ages to get from one place to the next. Yaughton seems like a lovely, convincingly realized village, but there's nothing in the environment to justify your slow progress from building to building.

It's a shame to see The Chinese Room's penchant for inventive storytelling undone by a haphazard delivery and tedious pace. Whatever good idea sparked the genesis of this journey is lost to unwieldy design.

UPDATED Aug. 11 11:17 a.m.: It turns out that there is a way to run in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. It's just extremely unclear and counter-intuitive if you've had any experience playing first-person perspective games (plus, it's not mentioned on the in-game control scheme).

To run, simply hold down the R2 button. It's not immediately obvious that you're running, however. You've got to build up momentum, so just keep R2 held down and you'll eventually be moving at a faster clip. The feature was apparently a late addition to the game, so there wasn't time to build any sort of tutorial mechanism in.

I'll just add, I stand by my criticisms even with this control change. Being able to run could improve the pacing, but the fact remains that the story feels disjointed because of the way it's delivered. Some people revel in assembling narrative puzzle pieces in that manner — hell, I adore how The Fullbright Company did it in Gonoe Home — but it doesn't work for me in this game. You still spend too much time trying to figure out which character is speaking at any given moment, which renders many of the plot's nuances unclear.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

The Good

Appropriately eerie sense of desolation • Amazing soundtrack

The Bad

Tedium-inducing pace • Disjointed story delivery makes it hard to connect with the human heart

The Bottom Line

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is an end-of-the-world story that leaves you puzzled, and a little bit sleepy.

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